If You're Curious About These Questions...
You should listen to this audiobook
- Have you ever wondered why it’s becoming increasingly difficult to focus on a single page of a book without your mind wandering or reaching for your phone?
- Did you know that the way you read on a screen is physically reconfiguring your brain—and potentially eroding your capacity for deep, critical thinking?
- What’s the secret to raising children who can navigate a world of digital distractions without losing the life-changing ability to immerse themselves in a good book?
Listen to Reader, Come Home — Free Audiobook
Key Takeaways from Reader, Come Home
- Understand why reading is a cultural invention rather than an innate ability, and how the brain uses neuroplasticity to build entirely new networks to process text.
- Discover how deep reading builds empathy through perspective-taking, and why the decline of this practice is linked to a 40 percent drop in empathy among young adults.
- Learn how consuming up to 100,000 words a day in short, digital bursts fragments our attention spans and directly hinders our ability to think deeply.
- Find out why abandoning digital media isn't the solution to our shrinking attention spans, and how intentionally balancing analog and digital tools can save our deep-reading skills.
- Grasp how your brain's circuitry adapts to whatever you read, meaning your cognitive networks physically change depending on whether you skim a screen or immerse yourself in a physical book.
Reader, Come Home — Full Chapter Overview
Chapter 1: Recommendation
Chapter 2: Reading is a learned skill our brains develop over time, not an innate ability at birth.
Chapter 3: The digital age is reshaping our deep reading skills, even as we need them more than ever.
Chapter 4: Our attention grows increasingly fragmented, which impairs deep reading.
Chapter 5: Children are especially vulnerable to fragmented attention spans, which seriously affects the development of their brains.
Chapter 6: Parents reading to their children boost their overall development far more than screens ever could.
Chapter 7: The United States faces a severe reading crisis, which makes it essential that children of all ages receive support and guidance.
Chapter 8: To be ready for tomorrow, we should nurture children’s brains with the best of both worlds.
Chapter 9: Safeguarding our third life as readers preserves our capacity to turn knowledge into wisdom.
Reader, Come Home Summary & Overview
Reader, Come Home (2018) is a meditation on the future of reading in the age of digital revolution and diminishing attention spans. Drawing on the latest neuroscientific research, Maryanne Wolf unpacks the cultural and cognitive dimensions of a technological transformation that’s reshaped our relationship with the written word. At the heart of her investigation is a question whose answer will determine how our societies will look in the future: What will reading mean to our children, a generation which has never known a world without Google, smartphones and e-books?
Who Should Listen to Reader, Come Home?
- Bibliophiles who wonder why it’s gotten so hard to focus on reading
- E-readers nostalgic about yesteryear’s paper-and-ink books
- Parents worried about their children’s use of digital devices
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